Many allow visitors under various circumstances, i.e. the Rule of St Benedict, which probably doesn't include a tour of the brewery but may include drinking the beer at a meal or two. Sometimes there are also various open house days. We were fortunate enough to hit Orval on an open house day a few years ago, pretty neat.

For those planning a pilgrimage you should know there are no tours and currently the gift shop at the Abby doesn't have a liquor license so the best you can do is buy a chalice with their insignia. It is selling at a lot of package store in Massachusetts. I've been excited about this for a couple years because I grew up near St. Joseph's Abby and currently only live 25 minutes from it and I've been hearing about it from my brother who almost became a monk there and now runs their gift shop and two close friends are former monks there. The beer tastes terrific. Not nearly as heavy as most trappist ales; I think because of this the more subtle characteristics of the yeast and malt shine. My only problem with it is that because they go down so easy the $17 price for a 4 pack of 11.2 oz bottles is hard to bear.

It is very well done. I think they did a great job of sticking to the Trappist tradition but making it their own. It 6.6% abv. Some Trappist ales are in the double digits with abv.Another very cool thing is the monks are growing experimental barley fields and sharing what they learn with local farmers so we will hopefully have a good supply of local grains. We already have a small local malter and some varieties of hops do well around here so hopefully this will eventually be an all local ingredient beer. I hope that trickles down to us homebrewers.